On Wed, Jan 19, 2000 at 08:23:02PM -0700, Peter J. Braam wrote:
> A friend lost her partition table...
>
> Is there a scanning tool that can restore it?
>From the README in the util-linux rescuept directory:
As far as I now know, there are four utilities that attempt to
assist in recovering a lost partition table, or a partition
that was deleted by mistake.
(i) findsuper is a small utility that finds blocks with the ext2
superblock signature, and prints out location and some info.
It is in the non-installed part of the e2progs distribution.
(ii) rescuept is a utility that recognizes ext2 superblocks,
FAT partitions, swap partitions, and extended partition tables;
it may also recognize BSD disklabels and Unixware 7 partitions.
It prints out information that can be used with fdisk or sfdisk
to reconstruct the partition table.
It is in the non-installed part of the util-linux distribution.
(iii) fixdisktable (http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/people/chaffee/fat32.html)
is a utility that handles ext2, FAT, NTFS, ufs, BSD disklabels
(but not yet old Linux swap partitions); it actually will rewrite
the partition table, if you give it permission.
(iv) gpart (http://home.pages.de/~michab/gpart/) is a utility
that handles ext2, FAT, Linux swap, HPFS, NTFS, FreeBSD and
Solaris/x86 disklabels, minix, reiser fs; it prints a proposed
contents for the primary partition table, and is well-documented.
The current directory contains rescuept.
I would never have written it had I known about fixdisktable
and gpart. However, now that it exists I find several situations
that are handled by rescuept and not by any of the others,
so let it be for the moment.
[I can add that I've seen several happy reports about rescuept
and gpart. People seem to have less luck with fixdisktable.]
